Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 25th Oct 2008 19:24 UTC, submitted by Michael Steil
"If you disassemble a single binary, you can never tell why something was done in a certain way. If you have eight different versions, you can tell a lot. This episode of Computer Archeology is about reverse engineering eight different versions of Microsoft BASIC 6502 (Commodore, AppleSoft etc.), reconstructing the family tree, and understanding when bugs were fixed and when new bugs, features and easter eggs were introduced. This article also presents a set of assembly source files that can be made to compile into a byte exact copy of seven different versions of Microsoft BASIC, and lets you even create your own version."
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Member since:
2008-03-10
I thought this was an interesting exercise, and regardless of its quality, the range of machines running Microsoft BASIC made it a worthwhile choice.
I agree about BBC BASIC - even today, I think it is a handy dialect. As well as having good features (some inspired by COMAL), it was very fast compared considering the hardware. Back then, it used to annoy me to read criticisms of BASIC that didn't actually apply to Acorn's.